An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant Part 11

He was a true prophet, but, Elijah-like, he seemed to himself to be alone. His derision of the current religion seems sometimes needless.

Yet even that has the grand note of sincerity. What he desired he in no small measure achieved--that his readers should be arrested and feel themselves face to face with reality. His startling intuition, his intellectual uprightness, his grasp upon things as they are, his pa.s.sion for what ought to be, made a great impression upon his age. It was in itself a religious influence. Here was a mind of giant force, of sternest truthfulness. His untruths were those of exaggeration. His injustices were those of prejudice. He invested many questions of a social and moral, of a political and religious sort with a n.o.bler meaning than they had had before. His _French Revolution_, his papers on _Chartism_, his unceasing comment on the troubled life of the years from 1830 to 1865, are of highest moment for our understanding of the growth of that social feeling in the midst of which we live and work. In his brooding sympathy with the downtrodden he was a great inaugurator of the social movement. He felt the curse of an aristocratic society, yet no one has told us with more drastic truthfulness the evils of our democratic inst.i.tutions. His word was a great corrective for much 'rose-water' optimism which prevailed in his day. The note of hope is, however, often lacking. The mythology of an absentee G.o.d had faded from him. Yet the G.o.d who was clear to his mature consciousness, clear as the sun in the heavens, was a G.o.d over the world, to judge it inexorably.

Again, it is not difficult to acc.u.mulate evidence in his words which looks toward pantheism; but what one may call the religious benefit of pantheism, the sense that G.o.d is in his world, Carlyle often loses.

Materialism is to-day so deeply discredited that we find it difficult to realise that sixty years ago the problem wore a different look. Carlyle was never weary of pouring out the vials of his contempt on 'mud-philosophies' and exalting the spirit as against matter. Never was a man more opposed to the idea of a G.o.dless world, in which man is his own chief end, and his sensual pleasures the main aims of his existence.

His insight into the consequences of our commercialism and luxury and absorption in the outward never fails. Man is G.o.d's son, but the effort to realise that sons.h.i.+p in the joy and trust of a devout heart and in the humble round of daily life sometimes seems to him cant or superst.i.tion. The humble life of G.o.dliness made an unspeakable appeal to him. He had known those who lived that life. His love for them was imperishable. Yet he had so recoiled from the superst.i.tions and hypocrisies of others, the Eternal in his majesty was so ineffable, all effort to approach him so unworthy, that almost instinctively he would call upon the man who made the effort, to desist. So magnificent, all his life long, had been his protest against the credulity and stupidity of men, against beliefs which a.s.sert the impossible and blink the facts, that, for himself, the great objects of faith were held fast to, so to say, in their naked verity, with a giant's strength. They were half-querulously denied all garment and embodiment, lest he also should be found credulous and self-deceived. From this t.i.tan labouring at the foundations of the world, this Samson pulling down temples of the Philistines on his head, this cyclops heaving hills at s.h.i.+ps as they pa.s.s by, it seems a long way to Emerson. Yet Emerson was Carlyle's friend.

EMERSON

Arnold said in one of his American addresses: 'Besides these voices--Newman, Carlyle, Goethe--there came to us in the Oxford of my youth a voice also from this side of the Atlantic, a clear and pure voice which, for my ear at any rate, brought a strain as new and moving and unforgetable as those others. Lowell has described the apparition of Emerson to your young generation here. He was your Newman, your man of soul and genius, speaking to your bodily ears, a present object for your heart and imagination.' Then he quotes as one of the most memorable pa.s.sages in English speech: 'Trust thyself. Accept the place which the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, confiding themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying a perception which was stirring in their hearts, working through their hands, dominating their whole being.' Arnold speaks of Carlyle's grim insistence upon labour and righteousness but of his scorn of happiness, and then says: 'But Emerson taught happiness in labour, in righteousness and veracity. In all the life of the spirit, happiness and eternal hope, that was Emerson's gospel. By his conviction that in the life of the spirit is happiness, by his hope and expectation that this life of the spirit will more and more be understood and will prevail, by this Emerson was great.'

Seven of Emerson's ancestors were ministers of New England churches. He inherited qualities of self-reliance, love of liberty, strenuous virtue, sincerity, sobriety and fearless loyalty to ideals. The form of his ideals was modified by the glow of transcendentalism which pa.s.sed over parts of New England in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, but the spirit in which Emerson conceived the laws of life, reverenced them and lived them, was the Puritan spirit, only elevated, enlarged and beautified by the poetic temperament. Taking his degree from Harvard in 1821, despising school teaching, stirred by the pa.s.sion for spiritual leaders.h.i.+p, the ministry seemed to offer the fairest field for its satisfaction. In 1825 he entered the Divinity School in Harvard to prepare himself for the Unitarian ministry. In 1829 he became a.s.sociate minister of the Second Unitarian Church in Boston. He arrived at the conviction that the Lord's Supper was not intended by Jesus to be a permanent sacrament. He found his congregation, not unnaturally, reluctant to agree with him. He therefore retired from the pastoral office. He was always a preacher, though of a singular order. His task was to befriend and guide the inner life of man. The influences of this period in his life have been enumerated as the liberating philosophy of Coleridge, the mystical vision of Swedenborg, the intimate poetry of Wordsworth, the stimulating essays of Carlyle. His address before the graduating cla.s.s of the Divinity School at Cambridge in 1838 was an impa.s.sioned protest against what he called the defects of historical Christianity, its undue reliance upon the personal authority of Jesus, its failure to explore the moral nature of man. He made a daring plea for absolute self-reliance and new inspiration in religion: 'In the soul let redemption be sought. Refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men. Cast conformity behind you. Acquaint men at first hand with deity.' He never could have been the power he was by the force of his negations. His power lay in the wealth, the variety, the beauty and insight with which he set forth the positive side of his doctrine of the greatness of man, of the presence of G.o.d in man, of the divineness of life, of G.o.d's judgment and mercy in the order of the world. One sees both the power and the limitation of Emerson's religious teaching. At the root of it lay a real philosophy. He could not philosophise. He was always pa.s.sing from the principle to its application. He could not systematise. He speaks of his 'formidable tendency to the lapidary style.' Granting that one finds his philosophy in fragments, just as one finds his interpretation of religion in flashes of marvellous insight, both are worth searching for, and either, in Coleridge's phrase, finds us, whether we search for it or not.

ARNOLD

What shall we say of Matthew Arnold himself? Without doubt the twenty years by which Arnold was Newman's junior at Oxford made a great difference in the intellectual atmosphere of that place, and of the English world of letters, at the time when Arnold's mind was maturing.

He was not too late to feel the spell of Newman. His mind was hardly one to appreciate the whole force of that spell. He was at Oxford too early for the full understanding of the limits within which alone the scientific conception of the world can be said to be true. Arnold often boasted that he was no metaphysician. He really need never have mentioned the fact. The a.s.sumption that whatever is true can be verified in the sense of the precise kind of verification which science implies is a very serious mistake. Yet his whole intellectual strength was devoted to the sustaining, one cannot say exactly the cause of religion, but certainly that of n.o.ble conduct, and to the a.s.sertion of the elation of duty and the joy of righteousness. With all the scorn that Arnold pours upon the trust which we place in G.o.d's love, he yet holds to the conviction that 'the power without ourselves which makes for righteousness' is one upon which we may in rapture rely.

Arnold had convinced himself that in an ago such as ours, which will take nothing for granted, but must verify everything, Christianity, in the old form of authoritative belief in supernatural beings and miraculous events, is no longer tenable. We must confine ourselves to such ethical truths as can be verified by experience. We must reject everything which goes beyond these. Religion has no more to do with supernatural dogma than with metaphysical philosophy. It has nothing to do with either. It has to do with conduct. It is folly to make religion depend upon the conviction of the existence of an intelligent and moral governor of the universe, as the theologians have done. For the object of faith in the ethical sense Arnold coined the phrase: 'The Eternal not ourselves which makes for righteousness.' So soon as we go beyond this, we enter upon the region of fanciful anthropomorphism, of extra belief, _aberglaube_, which always revenges itself. These are the main contentions of his book, _Literature and Dogma_, 1875.

One feels the value of Arnold's recall to the sense of the literary character of the Scriptural doc.u.ments, as urged in his book, _Saint Paul and Protestantism_, 1870, and again to the sense of the influence which the imagination of mankind has had upon religion. One feels the truth of his a.s.sertion of our ignorance. One feels Arnold's own deep earnestness.

It was his concern that reason and the will of G.o.d should prevail.

Though he was primarily a literary man, yet his great interest was in religion. One feels so sincerely that his main conclusion is sound, that it is the more trying that his statement of it should be often so perverse and his method of sustaining it so precarious. It is quite certain that the idea of the Eternal not ourselves which makes for righteousness is far from being the clear idea which Arnold claims. It is far from being an idea derived from experience or verifiable in experience, in the sense which he a.s.serts. It seems positively incredible that Arnold did not know that with this conception he pa.s.sed the boundary of the realm of science and entered the realm of metaphysics, which he so abhorred.

He was the eldest son of Thomas Arnold of Rugby. He was educated at Winchester and Rugby and at Balliol College. He was Professor of Poetry in Oxford from 1857 to 1867. He was an inspector of schools. The years of his best literary labour were much taken up in ways which were wasteful of his rare powers. He came by literary intuition to an idea of Scripture which others had built up from the point of view of a theory of knowledge and by investigation of the facts. He is the helpless personification of a view of the relation of science and religion which has absolutely pa.s.sed away. Yet Arnold died only in 1888. How much a distinguished inheritance may mean is gathered from the fact that a grand-daughter of Thomas Arnold and niece of Matthew Arnold, Mrs.

Humphry Ward, in her novels, has dealt largely with problems of religious life, and more particularly of religious thoughtfulness. She has done for her generation, in her measure, that which George Eliot did for hers.

MARTINEAU

As the chapter and the book draw to their close we can think of no man whose life more nearly spanned the century, or whose work touched more fruitfully almost every aspect of Christian thoughtfulness than did that of James Martineau. We can think of no man who gathered into himself more fully the significant theological tendencies of the age, or whose utterance ent.i.tles him to be listened to more reverently as seer and saint. He was born in 1805. He was bred as an engineer. He fulfilled for years the calling of minister and preacher. He gradually exchanged this for the activity of a professor. He was a religious philosopher in the old sense, but he was also a critic and historian. His position with reference to the New Testament was partly antiquated before his _Seat of Authority in Religion_, 1890, made its appearance. Evolutionism never became with him a coherent and consistent a.s.sumption. Ethics never altogether got rid of the innate ideas. The social movement left him almost untouched. Yet, despite all this, he was in some sense a representative progressive theologian of the century.

There is a parallel between Newman and Martineau. Both busied themselves with the problem of authority. Criticism had been fatal to the apprehension which both had inherited concerning the authority of Scripture. From that point onward they took divergent courses. The arguments which touched the infallible and oracular authority of Scripture, for Newman established that of the Church; for Martineau they had destroyed that of the Church four hundred years ago. Martineau's sense, even of the authority of Jesus, reverent as it is, is yet no pietistic and mystical view. The authority of Jesus is that of the truth which he speaks, of the goodness which dwells in him, of G.o.d himself and G.o.d alone. A real interest in the sciences and true learning in some of them made Martineau able to write that wonderful chapter in his _Seat of Authority_, which he ent.i.tled 'G.o.d in Nature.' Newman could see in nature, at most a sacramental suggestion, a symbol of transcendental truth.

The Martineaus came of old Huguenot stock, which in England belonged to the liberal Presbyterianism out of which much of British Unitarianism came. The righteousness of a persecuted race had left an austere impress upon their domestic and social life. Intellectually they inherited the advanced liberalism of their day. Harriet Martineau's earlier piety had been of the most fervent sort. She reacted violently against it in later years. She had little of the politic temper and gentleness of her brother. She described one of her own later works as the last word of philosophic atheism. James was, and always remained, of deepest sensitiveness and reverence and of a gentleness which stood in high contrast with his powers of conflict, if necessity arose. Out of Martineau's years as preacher in Liverpool and London came two books of rare devotional quality, _Endeavours after the Christian Life_, 1843 and 1847, and _Hours of Thought on Sacred Things_, 1873 and 1879. Almost all his life he was identified with Manchester College, as a student when the college was located at York, as a teacher when it returned to Manchester and again when it was removed to London. With its removal to Oxford, accomplished in 1889, he had not fully sympathised. He believed that the university itself must some day do justice to the education of men for the ministry in other churches than the Anglican. He was eighty years old when he published his _Types of Ethical Theory_, eighty-two when he gave to the world his _Study of Religion_, eighty-five when his _Seat of Authority_ saw the light. The effect of this postponement of publication was not wholly good. The books represented marvellous learning and ripeness of reflection. But they belong to a period anterior to the dates they bear upon their t.i.tle-pages. Martineau's education and his early professional experience put him in touch with the advancing sciences. In the days when most men of progressive spirit were carried off their feet, when materialism was flaunted in men's faces and the defence of religion was largely in the hands of those who knew nothing of the sciences, Martineau was not moved. He saw the end from the beginning. There is nothing finer in his latest work than his early essays--'Nature and G.o.d,' 'Science, Nescience and Faith,' and 'Religion as affected by Modern Materialism.' He died in 1900 in his ninety-fifth year.

It is difficult to speak of the living in these pages. Personal relations enforce reserve and brevity. Nevertheless, no one can think of Manchester College and Martineau without being reminded of Mansfield College and of Fairbairn, a Scotchman, but of the Independent Church. He also was both teacher and preacher all his days, leader of the movement which brought Mansfield College from Birmingham to Oxford, by the confession both of Anglicans and of Non-conformists the most learned man in his subjects in the Oxford of his time, an historian, touched by the social enthusiasm, but a religious philosopher, _par excellence_. His _Religion and Modern Life_, 1894, his _Catholicism, Roman and Anglican_, 1899, his _Place of Christ in Modern Theology_, 1893, his _Philosophy of the Christian Religion_, 1902, and his _Studies in Religion and Theology_, 1910, indicate the wideness of his sympathies and the scope of the application, of his powers. If imitation is homage, grateful acknowledgment is here made of rich spoil taken from his books.

Philosophy took a new turn in Britain after the middle of the decade of the sixties. It began to be conceded that Locke and Hume were dead. Had Mill really appreciated that fact he might have been a philosopher more fruitful and influential than he was. Sir William Hamilton was dead.

Mansel's endeavour, out of agnosticism to conjure the most absurdly positivistic faith, had left thinking men more exposed to scepticism, if possible, than they had been before. When Hegel was thought in Germany to be obsolete, and everywhere the cry was 'back to Kant,' some Scotch and English scholars, the two Cairds and Seth Pringle-Pattison, with Thomas Hill Green, made a modified Hegelianism current in Great Britain.

They led by this path in the introduction of their countrymen to later German idealism. By this introduction philosophy in both Britain and America has greatly gained. Despite these facts, John Caird's _Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion_, 1880, is still only a religious philosophy. It is not a philosophy of religion. His _Fundamental Ideas of Christianity_, 1896, hardly escapes the old ant.i.theses among which theological discussion moved, say, thirty years ago. Edward Caird's _Critical Philosophy of Kant_, 1889, and especially his _Evolution of Religion_, 1892, marked the coming change more definitely than did any of the labours of his brother. Thomas Hill Green gave great promise in his _Introduction to Hume_, 1885, his _Prolegomena to Ethics_, 1883, and still more in essays and papers scattered through the volumes edited by Nettles.h.i.+p after Green's death. His contribution to religious discussion was such as to make his untimely end to be deeply deplored. Seth Pringle-Pattison's early work, _The Development from Kant to Hegel_, 1881, still has great worth. His _Hegelianism and Personality_, 1893, deals with one aspect of the topic which needs ever again to be explored, because of the psychological basis which in religious discussion is now a.s.sumed.

JAMES

The greatest contribution of America to religious discussion in recent years is surely William James's _Varieties of Religious Experience_, 1902. The book is unreservedly acknowledged in Britain, and in Germany as well, to be the best which we yet have upon the psychology of religion. Not only so, it gives a new intimation as to what psychology of religion means. It blazes a path along which investigators are eagerly following. Boyce, in his Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard in 1911, declared James to be the third representative philosopher whom America has produced. He had the form of philosophy as Emerson never had. He could realise whither he was going, as Emerson in his intuitiveness never did. He criticised the dominant monism in most pregnant way. He recurred to the problems which dualism owned but could not solve. We cannot call the new scheme dualism. The world does not go back. Yet James made an over-confident generation feel that the centuries to which dualism had seemed reasonable were not so completely without intelligence as has been supposed by some. No philosophy may claim completeness as an interpretation of the universe. No more conclusive proof of this judgment could be asked than is given quite unintentionally in Haeckel's _Weltrthsel_.

At no point is this recall more earnest than in James's dealing with the ant.i.thesis of good and evil. The reaction of the mind of the race, and primarily of individuals, upon the fact of evil, men's consciousness of evil in themselves, their desire to be rid of it, their belief that there is a deliverance from it and that they have found that deliverance, is for James the point of departure for the study of the actual phenomena and the active principle of religion. The truest psychological and philosophical instinct of the ago thus sets the experience of conversion in the centre of discussion. Apparently most men have, at some time and in some way, the consciousness of a capacity for G.o.d which is unfulfilled, of a relation to G.o.d unrealised, which is broken and resumed, or yet to be resumed. They have the sense that their own effort must contribute to this recovery. They have the sense also that something without themselves empowers them to attempt this recovery and to persevere in the attempt. The psychology of religion is thus put in the forefront. The vast ma.s.ses of material of this sort which the religious world, both past and present, possesses, have been either actually unexplored, or else set forth in ways which distorted and obscured the facts. The experience is the fact. The best science the world knows is now to deal with it as it would deal with any other fact.

This is the epoch-making thing, the contribution to method in James's book. James was born in New York in 1842, the son of a Swedenborgian theologian. He took his medical degree at Harvard in 1870. He began to lecture there in anatomy in 1872 and became Professor of Philosophy in 1885. He was a Gifford and a Hibbert Lecturer. He died in 1910.

When James's thesis shall have been fully worked out, much supposed investigation of primitive religions, which is really nothing but imagination concerning primitive religions, will be shown in its true worthlessness. We know very little about primitive man. What we learn as to primitive man, on the side of his religion, we must learn in part from the psychology of the matured and civilised, the present living, thinking, feeling man in contact with his religion. Matured religion is not to be judged by the primitive, but the reverse. The real study of the history of religions, the study of the objective phenomena, from earliest to latest times, has its place. But the history of religions is perverted when it takes for fact in the life of primitive man that which never existed save in the imagination of twentieth century students.

Early Christianity, on its inner and spiritual side, is to be judged by later Christianity, by present Christianity, by the Christian experience which we see and know to-day, and not conversely, as men have always claimed. The modern man is not to be converted after the pattern which it is alleged that his grandfather followed. For, first, there is the question as to whether his grandfather did conform to this pattern. And beyond that, it is safer to try to understand the experience of the grandfather, whom we do not know, by the psychology and experience of the grandson, whom we do know, with, of course, a judicious admixture of knowledge of the history of the nineteenth century, which would occasion characteristic differences. The modern saint is not asked to be a saint like Francis. In the first place, how do we know what Francis was like?

In the second place, the experience of Francis may be most easily understood by the aid of modern experience of true revolt from worldliness and of consecration to self-sacrifice, as these exist among us, with, of course, the proper background furnished by the history of the thirteenth century. Souls are one. Our souls may be, at least in some measure, known to ourselves. Even the souls of some of our fellows may be measurably known to us. What are the facts of the religious experience? How do souls react in face of the eternal? The experience of religion, the experience of the fatherhood of G.o.d, of the sons.h.i.+p of man, of the moving of the spirit, is surely one experience. How did even Christ's great soul react, experience, work, will, and suffer? By what possible means can we ever know how he reacted, worked, willed, suffered? In the literature we learn only how men thought that he reacted. We must inquire of our own souls. To be sure, Christ belonged to the first century, and we live in the twentieth. It is possible for us to learn something of the first century and of the concrete outward conditions which caused his life to take the shape which it did. We learn this by strict historical research. a.s.suredly the supreme measure in which the spirit of all truth and goodness once took possession of the Nazarene, remains to us a mystery unfathomed and unfathomable.

Dwelling in Jesus, that spirit made through him a revelation of the divine such as the world has never seen. Yet that mystery leads forth along the path of that which is intelligible. And, in another sense, even such religious experience as we ourselves may have, poor though it be and sadly limited, leads back into the same mystery.

It was with this contention that religion is a fact of the inner life of man, that it is to be understood through consciousness, that it is essentially and absolutely reasonable and yet belongs to the transcendental world, it was with this contention that, in the person of Immanuel Kant, the history of modern religious thought began. It is with this contention, in one of its newest and most far-reaching applications in the work of William James, that this history continues. For no one can think of the number of questions which recent years have raised, without realising that this history is by no means concluded. It is conceivable that the changes which the twentieth century will bring may be as noteworthy as those which the nineteenth century has seen. At least we may be grateful that so great and sure a foundation has been laid.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CHAPTER I

WERNLE, PAUL. _Einfuhrung in das theologische Studium._ Tubingen, 2.

Aufl., 1911.

DIE KULTUR DER GEGENWART. Th. I., Abth. iv. 1. _Geschichte der Christlichen Religion_, v. Wellhausen, Julieber, Harnack u. A., 2. Aufl.

Berlin, 1909.

DIE KULTUR DER GEGENWART. Th. I., Abth. iv. 2. _Systematische Christliche Religion_, v. Troeltsch, Herrmann, Holtzmann u. A., 2. Aufl.

Berlin, 1909.

PFLEIDERER, OTTO. _The Development of Theology in Germany since Kant, and its Progress in Great Britain since_ 1825. Transl., J. FREDERICK SMITH. London, 1893.

LICHTENBERGER, F. _Histoire des Idees Religieuses en Allemagne despuis le milieu du XVIII' siecle a nos jours._ Paris, 1873. Transl., with notes, W. HASTIE. Edinburgh, 1889.

ADENEY, W.F. _A Century of Progress in Religious Life and Thought._ London, 1901.

HARNACK, ADOLF. _Das Wesen des Christenthums._ Berlin, 1900. Transl., _What is Christianity?_ T.B. SAUNDERS. London, 1901.

STEPHEN, LESLIE. _History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century._ 2 vols. London, 3rd ed., 1902.

TROELTSCH, ERNST. Art. 'Deismus' in Herzog-Hauck, _Realencyclopadie fur Protestantische Theologie und Kirche._ 3. Aufl. Leipzig, 4. Bd., 1898, s. 532 f.: art. 'Aufklarung,' 2. Bd., 1897, s. 225 f.: art. 'Idealismus, deutscher,' 8. Bd., 1900, s. 612 f.

MIRBT, CARL. Art. 'Pietiamus' in Herzog-Hauck, _Realencydopadie_, 15.

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RITSCHL, ALBRECHT. _Geschichte des Pietismus_, 3 Bde. Bonn, 1880-1886.

CHAPTER II